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❶To use them anyway calls to mind the story of the man who looked for his lost keys near a streetlight one night not because that was where he dropped them but just because the light was better there.

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Wealthier kids tend to have more educated parents who have more free time. They also have more books at home and more educational experiences overall think museum and library trips, international travel, etc. The bottom line from research conducted on the effectiveness of homework is that there is little conclusive evidence that homework improves educational outcomes.

At the elementary level there is no correlation with greater success. At the secondary level there seems to be some modest correlation with better outcomes, but results varied by subject and type of homework assigned. So the question now is.. Generalizations are always dangerous, and ironic statements are sometimes fun to write. Not all assignments are equal. In these circumstances homework can bolster learning while inculcating good study habits.

Otherwise though, I would make the most of class time and save the homework assignments for when they really matter. Alfie Kohn , education , homework , outcomes. You may use these HTML tags and attributes: Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Does Homework Help or Hurt? Photo by Shayla Beley Homework has been a controversial topic pretty much since education became free and compulsory throughout much of the United States at the turn of the last century.

However, for high schoolers, a decent amount of homework should be given to help them with exams. Middle schoolers should get more homework than elementary kids, but not nearly as much as high school. Homework , School , student , Teacher. If you want a picture to show with your comment, go get a gravatar. Other stories filed under Opinion.

Should Schools Start Later? Do Video-Games Cause Violence? Why Is Skateboarding So Trendy? Child working on homework.

Via Flickr Child working on homework. Close Modal Window Hang on for a minute But this remarkable fact is rarely communicated to the general public. In , Cooper summarized the available research with a sentence that ought to be e-mailed to every parent, teacher, and administrator in the country: It, too, found minuscule correlations between the amount of homework done by sixth graders, on the one hand, and their grades and test scores, on the other.

For third graders, the correlations were negative: He was kind enough to offer the citations, and I managed to track them down. The point was to see whether children who did math homework would perform better on a quiz taken immediately afterward that covered exactly the same content as the homework. The third study tested 64 fifth graders on social studies facts. All three of these experiments found exactly what you would expect: The kids who had drilled on the material — a process that happened to take place at home — did better on their respective class tests.

The final study, a dissertation project, involved teaching a lesson contained in a language arts textbook. It seems safe to say that these latest four studies offer no reason to revise the earlier summary statement that no meaningful evidence exists of an academic advantage for children in elementary school who do homework. The correlation only spikes at or above grade A large correlation is necessary, in other words, but not sufficient.

Indeed, I believe it would be a mistake to conclude that homework is a meaningful contributor to learning even in high school. Remember that Cooper and his colleagues found a positive effect only when they looked at how much homework high school students actually did as opposed to how much the teacher assigned and only when achievement was measured by the grades given to them by those same teachers. All of the cautions, qualifications, and criticisms in this chapter, for that matter, are relevant to students of all ages.

Students who take this test also answer a series of questions about themselves, sometimes including how much time they spend on homework. For any number of reasons, one might expect to find a reasonably strong association between time spent on homework and test scores. Yet the most striking result, particularly for elementary students, is precisely the absence of such an association.

Consider the results of the math exam. Fourth graders who did no homework got roughly the same score as those who did 30 minutes a night. Remarkably, the scores then declined for those who did 45 minutes, then declined again for those who did an hour or more! In twelfth grade, the scores were about the same regardless of whether students did only 15 minutes or more than an hour.

In the s, year-olds in a dozen nations were tested and also queried about how much they studied. Again, the results were not the same in all countries, even when the focus was limited to the final years of high school where the contribution of homework is thought to be strongest.

Usually it turned out that doing some homework had a stronger relationship with achievement than doing none at all, but doing a little homework was also better than doing a lot. Again they came up empty handed. Our students get significantly less homework than their counterparts across the globe. Every step of this syllogism is either flawed or simply false.

Premise 2 has been debunked by a number of analysts and for a number of different reasons. But in fact there is now empirical evidence, not just logic, to challenge the conclusions.

Two researchers looked at TIMSS data from both and in order to be able to compare practices in 50 countries. When they published their findings in , they could scarcely conceal their surprise:. Not only did we fail to find any positive relationships, [but] the overall correlations between national average student achievement and national averages in the frequency, total amount, and percentage of teachers who used homework in grading are all negative!

If these data can be extrapolated to other subjects — a research topic that warrants immediate study, in our opinion — then countries that try to improve their standing in the world rankings of student achievement by raising the amount of homework might actually be undermining their own success.

More homework may actually undermine national achievement. Incidental research raises further doubts about homework. Reviews of homework studies tend to overlook investigations that are primarily focused on other topics but just happen to look at homework, among several other variables.

Here are two examples:. First, a pair of Harvard scientists queried almost 2, students enrolled in college physics courses in order to figure out whether any features of their high school physics courses were now of use to them.

At first they found a very small relationship between the amount of homework that students had had in high school and how well they were currently doing.

Once the researchers controlled for other variables, such as the type of courses kids had taken, that relationship disappeared. The same researchers then embarked on a similar study of a much larger population of students in college science classes — and found the same thing: She then set out to compare their classroom practices to those of a matched group of other teachers. Are better teachers more apt to question the conventional wisdom in general?

More responsive to its negative effects on children and families? This analysis rings true for Steve Phelps, who teaches math at a high school near Cincinnati.

But as I mastered the material, homework ceased to be necessary. Lyons has also conducted an informal investigation to gauge the impact of this shift. He gave less and less homework each year before finally eliminating it completely. And he reports that.

Homework is an obvious burden to students, but assigning, collecting, grading, and recording homework creates a tremendous amount of work for me as well. Nor is the Harvard physics study. People who never bought it will not be surprised, of course. Put differently, the research offers no reason to believe that students in high-quality classrooms whose teachers give little or no homework would be at a disadvantage as regards any meaningful kind of learning.

That will be the subject of the following chapter….

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Sep 23, · For high school students, the positive line continues to climb until between 90 minutes and 2½ hours of homework a night, after which returns diminish. Beyond achievement, proponents of homework argue that it can have many other beneficial effects. They claim it can help students develop good study habits so they are ready to grow as their cognitive capacities mature.

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The average high school student doing homework outperformed 69% of the students in a class with no homework. Homework in middle school was half as effective. In elementary school, there is no measurable correlation between homework and achievement. Despite all the research, homework remains something of a mystery.

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Oct 26, · Nothing quite inspires fear in the mind of a student as much as the phrase, “Wait, we had homework?” Homework—while often dreaded by students and teachers alike—is an idea which has undoubtedly been powerfully integrated into the education system. One question is being asked over and over again—does homework really help students perform better in. For younger students, the relationship between homework and performance was much weaker. The study showed that not only does homework help grades, but it can also help study habits, attitudes toward school, self-discipline, inquisitiveness, and independent problem-solving skills.

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Does Homework Help or Hurt? Posted by Jason Przypek, Editor on Monday, November 17, then they are going to hold students’ feet to the fire by heaping on the homework in the hopes that students and parents will pick up whatever slack is left from incomplete mastery in the classroom. Missing or late homework assignments are punished with. Writing for students primary homework help tudors homework help tudor clothes does homework help or hurt tudors primary homework help. Students may have to get a job to help support their family, affecting the hours they sleep and work on their homework.